With the introduction of the first national standards for mercury pollution from power plants in December of 2011, many facilities will turn to sorbent injection to meet the EPA Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) requirements. Sorbent injection is a technology that has shown good potential for achieving mercury removal to the MATS standards.
While several sorbents are viable for sorbent injection, activated carbon (AC) has been proven to the largest extent. AC is a high surface area sorbent typically created from the activation of coal (or other material high in carbon content) in a controlled environment to create a porous network. This porous network and chemical activity of the AC can be manipulated during activation/manufacturing to create an AC that will preferentially adsorb certain contaminants of concern (e.g., mercury from power plant flue gas to meets MATS standards). Additionally, post activation treatment can be performed to enhance the chemical reactivity of the AC for the target compound(s) of interest. For sorbent injection, the AC is ground and sized to produce powdered activated carbon (PAC), most typically to 95% passing the 325 mesh for mercury capture from flue gas.
Many efforts have been made to improve PAC materials to increase the mercury capture potential and thereby decrease the PAC loading to reduce materials handling and cost burdens. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,953,494 describes treating a carbonaceous substrate with an effective amount of a bromine-containing gas; U.S. Pat. No. 8,551,431 describes a sorbent with halogens applied with washing; U.S. Pat. No. 8,057,576 describes a dry admixture of activated carbon and halogen-containing additive; and U.S. Pat. No. 8,512,655 describes a carbon promoted by reaction with a halogen or halide and possibly other components to increase the reactivity of the sorbent. Other attempts have been made to improve the mercury removal from power plant flue gas using halogen additives to the power plant process itself. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 8,524,179 describes adding iodine or bromine to the feed material; and U.S. Pat. No. 8,679,430 describes injecting a halogen compound into the combustion chamber and/or exhaust stream. All of these presented disclosures rely on halogen additives to improve mercury capture. Since bromine is a strong oxidant, it can also cause oxidation and corrosion of the duct system and other equipment with which it comes into contact, causing increased maintenance and cost. Further, there are currently no monitoring requirements for bromine compounds; but if emitted to the atmosphere, it would be detrimental to the environment (e.g., ozone depletion in the air and reaction to form carcinogenic compounds in water). Therefore, it would be advantageous to use alternative methods to reduce sorbent injection rates and still achieve low mercury emissions.
Sorbent injection, as applied for control of mercury for MATS compliance, typically involves the pneumatic conveyance of a powdered sorbent from a storage silo into the process gas of a power plant's flue duct downstream of the boiler and upstream of a particulate control device such as an electrostatic precipitator (ESP) or fabric filter (FF). Once introduced to the process gas, the powdered sorbent disperses and adsorbs mercury and other unwanted constituents in the flue gas. The powdered sorbent with adsorbed mercury (and other constituents) then is captured and removed from the gas by a particulate control device.
In summary, sorbent injection is a proven effective way to remove mercury; however, for some applications, the amount of powdered activated carbon (PAC) required can be very high and, therefore, costly (e.g., because of the high temperatures, short residence times, and numerous other complicating factors). The purpose of this disclosure is to provide a new method of sorbent injection that would reduce sorbent injection rates while not involving other potentially detrimental compounds such as bromine to the solution.